mgo.licio.us

"The face of the operation is Briatore (referred to exclusively in the film by his colleagues and angry, chanting detractors as "Flavio"), an anthropomorphic radish who spends most of his time at QPR plotting to fire all of the managers."

At press time, Harbaugh had sent Michigan’s athletic department an envelope containing a heavily annotated seating chart, a list of the 63,000 seat views he had found unsatisfactory, and a glowing 70-page report on section 25, row 12, seat 9, which he claimed is “exactly what the great sport of football is all about.”

The left is a screen-cap from the pinnacle of awesome. Threads existing in the shot are as follows: WOOOO-HOOOOO!; Hello: Chris Fox; MUPPETS!!!!!!!; Sullinger: post-game words to Burke; Hello: Taco Charlton; official greatest day of ever thread; Ozone: Meyer > Hoke on Recruiting Trail = Egg in Face; The Announcers; Brady Hoke; Senior Night Video?; Life, in General; What just happened???; and Super Saturday (2-18-2012) Recap. That last by YakAttack has the play-by-play for everything that went down but here's Saturday:

~11:59 p.m. Jake Butt and Logan Tuley-Tillman enter REM sleep, where their dreams are invaded by GHOST OF NINJA RECRUITING SHANE MORRIS, who gives them helmets with wings and beckons they fly with him to the land of a thousand trees.

I'm So Softball Right Now You Guys! The shutout streak is now up to four games, thanks to Michigan's magnificent freshmen starters. I suddenly feel like doing lines!

Player

ERA

W-L

GS

CG

SHO

IP

BB

SO

OppAvg

Sara Driesenga

0.91

3-1

4

2

1

23.0

7

6

0.239

Haylie Wagner

1.15

4-0

5

3

2

24.1

4

22

0.186

Haylie is a clone of Jordan Taylor (even played for the same league in Orange County) and is the crafty lefty complement to Driesenga. As such Wagner wasn't supposed to have a lot of strikeouts but, uh, well look above. The other shutout was Junior Stephanie Speierman, who was 18-1 last year with a 1.88 ERA in 122 innings. I had to look at several other top teams to convince myself these rotational riches are as ridiculous as they look. They are.

Yes, our readers with Office Space The Office joke names are better at research than whoever's doing the signs for Ohio State's head coach. I'm sure this has nothing to do with which school is a better research institution.

Which school is the better research institution? U.S. News & World Report has its new rankings for "Worlds Best Universities" and M is 14th in the world, 10th in the nation, and 2nd among FBS schools. Ohio State (111th in world, 35th in U.S.) isn't so hot, though they'd still be middle of the Pac 12, upper quarter of the ACC, and only behind Texas-Austin anywhere else. The Big Ten is back ahead of the Pac, more because of the Oregon schools than what they added. Other bits of interest I put in a table-tastic diary.

Every Goal Against Northern Michigan. This is one of my favorite new regular column, a weekly picture-paging of M scoring by CenterIce. Since most of my hockey knowledge comes from watching Lidstrom, the one I was instantly nodding at was the scoring opportunity created by Merrill having an NHL head on his shoulders:

Head up the whole way Merrill gets the puck from Moffie and finds Deblois cutting through the middle.

The Northerners are all kinds of confused, obviously since the blueliner has closed his legs like he's in shot blocking position.

And whoever did it is obviously a follower of The Word of Hoke, as they used a small "o", didn't use the word "state" and....my favorite part, added "College" to it. Priceless.

Edit: Bottle Spitting certainly creates the intended visual in my head of the bulging lip, an empty soda bottle and the outline of a tin of chew on the back pocket. Whoever wrote that is a damned genius.

guh

So my piece on "The Sign" is that the information doesn't seem to be a lie or innaccurate, just simply not fully explanatory. Which, like duh man. It's a PR sign made to put OSU in the best light possible. So it's a half-truth yes, but isn't all PR. I mean it's not made up numbers. It's just not all the numbers and not the final numbers. I think the whole thing is stupid and shouldn't have been done in the first place.

“Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect.” - Woody

What do we call a PR sign that prints half-truths and intentionally misrepresents information in order to influence people to make a decision based on knowingly false pretenses?

If I have 40 rotten eggs and 20 good eggs and I report that my stocks are 10 bad eggs and 20 good eggs, that is "just not all the numbers and not the final numbers." It also completely misrepresents my egg situation, especially if I'm influencing decisions by telling people I have stocks of 60 eggs, and two good ones for every rotten one.

Good PR is what gets across what's truly better about what you're selling; using it to lie to the market can be effective but it should never be acceptable, and carries a considerable risk because the worst thing you could possibly do to your brand is to make the market think of you as a liar.

The thing isn't just stupid; it was dishonest. And as a Michigan fan it's my duty to shout "Urban Meyer will lie to you to get you to commit" in earshot of any recruit. Now that's PR.

You're comparing apples to oranges (or eggs I guess). It would be like if you had 40 rotten eggs and 20 good eggs and advertising that you have 20 good eggs. Which would be true. Someone who wants to buy 20 or fewer good eggs would be pleased to find you have ample stock to fulfill their needs. The rotten eggs are irrelevant to them.

In the case of the sign, a kid interested in OSU who will play football and wants to major in engineering would think, there are more engineering majors on this football team than the one at UofM. And he would be correct.

This sign makes no assertions, it simply states a small sampling of the listed majors of the two schools. Obviously it implies that OSU doesn't have as many General Studies majors as UofM, but that's all. And some kid may view that as a good thing or a bad thing.

“Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect.” - Woody

Its like you saying, we (OSU) have 20 good eggs, and omitting that you have 40 bad eggs, while we (UM) are saying we have 20 good eggs, but only 10 bad eggs....and you stating that you (OSU) have better eggs than we do.

Omission is still lying. Or at least, that's what my wife keeps telling me.

No, I didn't say it was wrong. It's spin. It's not lying. Nothing stated on that sign is false. And OSU didn't put on that sign, anything along the lines of: "And therefore we are a better school academically" Obviously it is meant to have recruits or their parents infer such a premise, but it does not assert one.

“Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect.” - Woody

Honestly, that was one of my many first thoughts. I thought, they just make kids declare and tons declared General instead of picking anything specific, and turns out, we do the same thing, we just have a different name for it. I'm not an 18yr old potential recruit nor am I the parent to one, so the sign wasn't directed at me. So if they think it's gonna help recruit, great.

“Any time you give a man something he doesn't earn, you cheapen him. Our kids earn what they get, and that includes respect.” - Woody